Speed, slow. Memories? Yes.

THORNE BAY — Any memories, they asked.

Any photos?

Negative on the photos, I said, but memories? Check.

Speed Seaford died at Harborview the other day.

They unplugged him.

Which, in a way, is apropos. He was never plugged in. Not really. Having spent the brunt of his living in logging camps on Prince of Wales Island where the CB radio ruled, even in the age of smartphones and high def.

Speed’s definition of high was wrapped in elevation, and high definition meant the third line under a word in the dictionary.

He was hands on, he knew human nature and he talked slow. Therefore the nickname.

When they pulled the plug a month after he wrecked his four-stroke motorcycle on a strip of highway heading from Thorne Bay to Klawock his sons- and daughters-in-law, his wife and many nephews, nieces and grandchildren asked if I had any memories to share of Speed Seaford and I said, sure.

After these, there will be more, I said.

When you least expect it, they jump out.

It doesn’t end.

I first met Speed in the Harbor Bar, an establishment with a view of a small piece of the shrimp and seine fleet between the shed walls of the canneries in Petersburg, Alaska, where herring once flashed for days as they boiled in the ocean with the sun on their scales, and the salmon were so fat you could walk on their backs in the creeks they ran.

Those days were a half-century gone when I met Speed at the round table by the only window in the place, one sunny summer afternoon after spending the day in the woods slinging babbitts. He nursed a Miller and asked, what do you do?

He’s a choker setter, someone said, can’t you tell by his fingernails?

Humpff, said Speed, through a gray handlebar mustache. He was never one to waste words.

There were two men talking loudly at the bar, probably fishermen from down south that he wanted to fight, he said, and asked what I thought of that.

I’m game, I replied, and he laughed like a walrus might and hired me for a job later that I still think of a lot.

Speed grew up in Libby, Mont., worked the roads and bridges from there to Bonners Ferry. He married into a large family of railroaders, boxers and baseball players and took his bride north to a place called Coffman Cove at the edge of Clarence Straight, where he put his education to work building roads.

Prince of Wales Island was considered the largest logging enterprise in the world and Coffman was camp; a jumping off and getting on point where loggers in Filson tin pants, suspenders over striped rigging shirts, Romeos and snoose comprised the Sunday uniform. Any other day the Romeos were traded for caulked boots, and tin hats replaced baseball caps.

The whole archipelago was a neighborhood, and so I found Speed at the Harbor Bar 60 air miles north of Coffman. Or, maybe he found me.

I followed him to construction jobs in places like Nome and Trocadero Bay where, in winter the whales breached in the waves ahead of the work boat with its windows frozen with spray.

Once, in a place called Calder Bay, not far from the creek where logging-songster Buzz Martin was killed, Speed was in a backhoe churning up rock for a load as I and a fellow truck driver waited in the rain.

I stood by the cab with the Kenworth diesel chugging while Red sat on the ground behind his truck with a box-end wrench trying to fix a brake.

Speed swung the working end of the back hoe around and called me over.

He leaned slowly out of the cab as I scrambled up the rocks.

Tell Red, he said, that if he tries taking off the top of that air can, the spring will come loose and take his head clean off.

He went back to work.

Red, the other driver who was turning the bolt to release the can top, stopped when I said it, filed the wrench in his pocket and retired to the cab of his truck.

I have friends I tell these stories to and they won’t have it.

Once, in Alaska, they say, and laugh because they have heard a few of them before.

They have their own lives and their own stories.

If there is just one, though. Just one I am allowed to relay and take with, it’s this.

In Nome, where we hired on to build the Nome to Council Highway cutting through tundra beyond the Safety Roadhouse of Iditarod fame, and over the Solomon River where on a knoll overlooking the Bering Sea the graves of Inuits, Aleut, and Yupiks mix with miners and Chinese workers, a young Cat skinner once belly ached about the asininity of truck drivers.

We sat in the Polar Bar over beers and he deliberated over the ilk of the men behind the wheel of the big Terex trucks, their unsustainable density and plain stupidity.

Speed, cradling the inevitable Miller High Life looked at the boy and said quietly, “son, there is not a day on this earth when you can’t learn something from the lowliest truck driver.”

I wanted for a while to tattoo that on my chest.

I didn’t need to.

I keep it now with my memories of Speed.

The ones that come easy.

They all do, just at different times and some more frequently than others.

And when they come, they are thick, like honey or 90-weight, highly viscous, just like his voice.

Straight.

And slow.